Category Archives: Freedom of Speech and of the Press

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The Journolism of The Philadelphia Inquirer

No, that’s not a typographical error in the headline: The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias. We have previously written about the journolism of The Philadelphia Inquirer, often enough that this is the fifth article with that title. The newspaper reported:

Haverford College holds vigil for Palestinian student shot in Vermont

Haverford students, alumni, and staff gathered in Founders Hall to light candles and offer support for Kinnan Abdalhamid, the West Bank-born biology major and member of the school’s track team.

by Max Marin and Ximena Conde | Tuesday, November 28, 2023 | 7:21 PM EST

Jason J Eaton, mugshot by Burlington Police Department and is a pubic record.

Haverford College held a vigil on Tuesday in support of a Palestinian student who was shot in what authorities are investigating as a potential hate crime in Vermont on Saturday.About 200 Haverford students, alumni, and staff gathered in Founders Hall around 4:30 p.m. to light candles and offer support for Kinnan Abdalhamid, the West Bank-born biology major and member of the school’s track team, who was one of three victims of Saturday’s shooting.

Abdalhamid remains hospitalized in Burlington along with his two friends, Hisham Awartani and Tahseen Ahmed. The three college students, all 20, were visiting Burlington for the holiday weekend when a man opened fire on them without warning.

Note the publication date of the newspaper’s article: Tuesday, November 28th, at 7:21 PM EST. The reporters let readers know that this is being investigated to see if it was a hate crime, referencing an article published the previous day at 8:58 AM, and updated at 6:56 PM, in which it was reported:

Given the unprovoked nature of the attack and soaring tension around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Murad said it was understandable to suspect hate-based motivations at play in the case, but urged the public to withhold speculation as the investigation continues among local, state, and federal authorities. “We still do not know as much as we want to know.”

Returning to the originally cited article in the Inquirer:

Haverford’s vigil was structured in the Quaker tradition where students held long moments of silence broken only when someone was motivated to speak. One Palestinian student broke down in tears as she addressed the room. As two friends flanked her for support, she said there was no doubt in her mind the shooting was a hate crime.

“Palestinians’ suffering has to be recognized,” she said. “We’re humans.”

Authorities said the men were walking to a relative’s house in Burlington after a family gathering when Jason J. Eaton stepped up onto a nearby porch and, without a word, fired four shots from a Ruger .380 pistol, injuring all three.

While the motive remains unclear, authorities noted the victims were speaking in a mixture of English and Arabic, and two of them were wearing keffiyehs. The U.S. Department of Justice is assisting with an investigation into whether the unprovoked attack was a hate crime. Eaton, 48, was arrested Sunday and pleaded not guilty to three counts of attempted murder on Monday.

OK, fine. But there is absolutely nothing in the Inky’s reporting to tell you that the suspect, Jason Eaton, was off his rocker, suffering from depression, coocoo for Cocoa Puffs, and mostly a political whacko:

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain, Suspect in Shooting of Palestin-ian Students ‘Strug-gled With Depression’

According to NBC, Eaton appears to have a YouTube account that has playlists with videos that include “Expose Fauci,” long COVID, economics, and how to use brain crystals for “psychic powers.” An Instagram account that appears to belong to him also shows him on a farm and cooking.

In an X account that appeared to belong to Eaton, he describes himself as a “radical citizen…patrolling demockracy and crapitalism for oathcreepers.” A 2022 archived version of that same account, which contains the same photo, has a more subdued bio that describes him as a Vermont dad and part-time farmer. The archived X account also provides a link to a Substack, with the “wandering ramblings of a reformed broker on the ADHD/ASD spectrum.” The Substack only has one post, which is an essay on how restaurants can retain dishwashers.

I guess that part wouldn’t fit Teh Narrative, but actual journalists, rather than journolists, would have included it. It should be noted that the published reports about Mr Eaton and his mental health issues are dated on the morning of the 27th, and updated at 7:07 PM the same day, fully a day prior to the Inky’s story.

The mugshot of Mr Eaton? The newspaper doesn’t usually publish them, despite mugshots being easily available from the Philadelphia Police Department, but when it comes to a blue-eyed, blond-haired white guy? While the photo credit notes that it came from the Burlington Police Department, I found it in this article in the Inquirer.

Did the Inquirer actually lie to its readers? Nope, there’s nothing that I spotted which was demonstrably untrue. But the newspaper omitted a lot of facts, enough to be called lies of omission by some, facts which would change the impression that the article was intended to give.

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Rashida Tlaib and the rest of the Usual Suspects prove the need for a strong, independent, affirmatively Jewish Israel!

We are being told by the people the credentialed media use as spokesthings, like Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), the now-censured congresscritter from Detroit and a ‘Palestinian-American,’ if such an oxymoron can actually exist, that all the Palestinians want is their freedom. They don’t hate Israelis specifically, or Jews more generally, but just want their freedom. Mrs Tlaib even tried to claim that the mantra, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free!” as not being anti-Israeli at all, but no one actually believed her.

However, there’s an obvious question: do the (purported) leaders of the pro-Palestinian movement in the West actually represent the crowds behind them. The tweet I retweeted from @StopAntisemitism is just one of hundreds they’ve posted, documenting people living in the United States and Canada showing us exactly who they are. The Stop Antisemitism site is doing great work in exposing and identifying those people, and letting their colleges or employers know just who they are, and many have found their way to the unemployment line. If you think that’s a bad thing, just imagine how employers would react if one of their employees was caught on video calling for the death of [insert virtually forbidden slang for Negroes here].

Of course, even those stupid enough perhaps to want to say that kind of thing about blacks are generally not stupid enough to say it on tape, which means that they are at least not as stupid as the anti-Semites! Continue reading →

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Your #FreedomOfSpeech doesn’t include requiring other people to pay for it

It’s an old, old saw: the freedom of speech does not protect you if you yell, “Fire!” in a crowded theater. Simply put, the freedom of speech does not protect anyone from the consequences of their speech.

The Biden Administration certainly agreed with that, hating the idea that the riff-raff could challenge the Accepted Wisdom — which means: the government’s position — on the COVID-19 vaccines:

Two months after President Biden took office, his top digital adviser emailed officials at Facebook urging them to do more to limit the spread of “vaccine hesitancy” on the social media platform.

At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, officials held “weekly sync” meetings with Facebook, once emailing the company 16 “misinformation” posts. And in the summer of 2021, the surgeon general’s top aide repeatedly urged Google, Facebook and Twitter to do more to combat disinformation. Continue reading →

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The left sure like Christians, right up until they seem to be actual Christians!

We have been told what a devout Catholic President Biden is, and how former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was a good, believing Catholic. President Trump, on the other hand, showed us how fake a Christian he is, because he almost never attended religious services. Clearly, for the left, being a faithful Christian of some denomination or other was a pretty good thing. Or at least it was until someone who is actually a Christian becomes Speaker of the House! Continue reading →

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There are none so blind as those who will not see Even when bitchslapped by reality, Professor Maurice Isserman couldn't bring himself to say the right word

The Nation is a 158-year-old ‘progressive’ left-wing political magazine, in which Maurice Isserman just told us why he has, after many, many years, resigned from the Democratic Socialists of America. The thing is, after several recent years, he should not have been surprised. Continue reading →

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How does The Philadelphia Inquirer not even cover the World Series?

I understand that Philadelphians are disappointed that the Phillies choked lost a World Series berth with their Game 7 loss to the Arizona Diamondbacks, especially after the Phils won the first two games at Citizens Bank Park. Lose a seven-game series when you have a 2-0 lead?

With 6,245,051 people according to the 2020 census, Philadelphia and its surrounding metropolitan area is the seventh largest in the United States. With a population of 1,603,797, the city of Philadelphia itself is the sixth largest in the United States. So why, then, does The Philadelphia Inquirer, our nation’s third oldest continuously-published newspaper, rank only 17th in circulation? The winner of twenty Pulitzer Prizes, and the newspaper of record for the entire Philadelphia area — the Wilmington, Delaware, News Journal is a Gannett-owned joke — have exactly zero stories on the World Series, which is going on right now, the Texas Rangers and Arizona Diamondbacks tied at one game apiece!

The screen capture to the right was taken at 10:06 AM EDT this morning, and shows 17 stories in the sports section. Yeah, I get it: covering the Philadelphia Eagles and the 76ers and even the Flyers is important to the newspaper, but this is ridiculous. Scroll further down in the online sports section — my subscription is digital only — and I found separate sections for the Eagles, 76ers, Flyers, individual sports columnists, sports betting, women’s sports, college football, and even soccer, as though anyone cares about soccer, but not a single story on the World Series!

It’s not as though the newspaper does not publish stories from outside of its newsroom production: there were at least two stories from the Associated Press on national news showing on the website main page. The Inky could have included something about the series.

I subscribe to the newspaper, because now that I’ve moved out of the Keystone State, it’s my best source of information on the news there, and because I prefer to read the news rather than watch or listen to the news. My unlimited digital subscription costs $5.49 per week, which, times 52 weeks a year, equals $285.48 a year, yet the newspaper doesn’t even cover the World Series?

Christine Flowers once mocked me for paying for the Inky. She might have been right.

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Just because they like to behead babies is no reason to label Hamas “terrorists!

The First Street Journal has previously reported on the Associated Press Stylebook, and how the AP uses it to try to push political debates in one direction or another, which is almost always to the left. Well, now the AP believe that the credentialed media should not refer to terrorists as terrorists! Continue reading →

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When they show you who they are, believe them! Did The New York Times think that no one would notice?

In the first Avengers movie, Robert Downey, Jr, as Tony Stark, spots a SHIELD technician playing a video game at his terminal, and says, loudly, “That man is playing Galaga. He thought we wouldn’t notice, but we did.”

The tech quickly shuts down Galaga and returns to work . . . until the Avengers leave the room, when he brings up the game again.

NYT rehires Hitler-praising Soliman Hijjy to cover Israel-Hamas war

By Shannon Thaler | Friday, October 20, 2023 4:11 PM EDT

A New York Times reporter who came under fire last year for a praising Adolf Hitler in multiple resurfaced Facebook posts was rehired by the Gray Lady to cover the Israel-Palestine war.

Palestinian filmmaker Soliman Hijjy hailed the Nazi leader as recently as 2018 in a post on Facebook, when he shared a photo of himself captioned that he was “in a state of harmony as Hitler was during the Holocaust,” per a translation from Arabic by pro-Israel media watchdog site HonestReporting.

That same year, Hijjy was hired by the Times as a freelance journalist and worked on a slew of “visual investigations” published by the organization through 2021, including one on an Israeli airstrike that killed 44 people.

Hijjy’s 2018 post — including a 2012 Facebook post where he wrote, “How great you are, Hitler” in Arabic alongside a photoshopped image of Hitler seemingly taking a selfie — were unearthed last year, when pro-Israel outlets called out the Times for hiring antisemitic journalists as freelancers. Continue reading →

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I love it when a plan comes together . . . and when someone else’s plans fall apart! When people tell you who they are, believe them!

Perhaps my good friend Christine Flowers didn’t get to cancel these people herself, but it does show that while we all have our freedom of speech, other people have a freedom to listen, and some people might not like what you have to say!

Harvard students scramble to take back support for letter attacking Israel as some CEOs look to blacklist them

By Melissa Koenig | Wednesday, October 11, 2023 | 2:34 PM EDT

A flurry of Harvard University students and groups are desperately trying to backtrack on their support of a letter blaming Israel for the mass slaughter of its own people by Hamas terrorists — as some business titans seek to blacklist them from future jobs. Continue reading →